Policy —

Aw man, the cable’s out

Speaking of wacky conspiracies, Wired's Kim Zetter reports that the four massive undersea fiber optic cables that were recently severed are going to be out of commission for another week or so. (Fear not, there are friendly robots on the job, most of which I'm told harbor a secret affection for Hello Dolly.) As with this year's previous severing of multiple major data conduits serving Middle Eastern countries, there's a gentle hum of speculation—largely limited to blogs in the West—about whether the U.S. government might have had a hand in it. And as before, if the respectable press deigns to mention these notions, it's with a condescending chuckle about conspiracy theories and tinfoil hats. You know: "Ho ho, that Arab press, such fevered imaginations those people have..." Now, I have no idea why there have been so many overlapping problems with the fat glass this year, but I find this dismissive attitude pretty weird: Speculation about government action seems at least as reasonable and realistic as speculation about seismic activity or ship anchors.

Just as a general point—obvious but maybe worth making anyway—"conspiracy" is, by definition, what intelligence agencies do. A group of people with lots of resources, colluding in secret to infiltrate other organizations and influence world events—that's not a paranoid theory, that's their job description. If nothing of geostrategic consequence is attributable to conspiracy, we are wasting a lot of tax money.

More specifically, it's also not a wacky theory that the joint NSA/CIA Special Collection Service would very much like to tap these undersea fiber cables. We know this is true, because they've said so. It's in, like, books and magazines and other information sources not published on an old mimeograph machine in some dude's parents' basement. We know they've found it tremendously difficult—though not impossible—to do so thus far, in part because it's very hard to splice the fiber without at least briefly creating a detectable service interruption. So while, again, I dont know what the source of the current trouble is, we do know that if SCS were ever able to do this thing they've repeatedly stated their urgent desire to do, it would entail a disruption of data flow along these pipes, and a corresponding need to cover that disruption. I'll save everyone the modus ponens: Our intelligence agencies have told us they are hoping to create a temporary disruption just like this. So I'm perplexed that anyone would find it daffy to then suggest that a temporary disruption just like this could be the work of our intelligence services.

Installing a tap wouldn't even be the only good intelligence motive for doing a cut. We ended up joining World War I as the result of a similar disruption by the British, who severed Germany's transatlantic cables. The point was not to cut off German communications, but to force them to resort to either interceptable radio transmissions, or to other underwater telegraph cables that the British already had access to. That's how the British (and eventually the American press) ended up in possession of the Zimmermann Telegram, in which the Kaiser offered to support a Mexican invasion of the U.S. in the event that Wilson entered the war.

So to recap: We know governments have cut undersea cables for intelligence purposes in the past. We know that a goal our own government has acknowledged to be at the top of its intelligence agenda would probably require cutting undersea cables. But only paranoid kooks think "covert government action" is among the plausible explanations for a series of a series of severed cables. Who's out of touch with reality here?